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1 Westerly v54:
JeNNy strAuss
buildiNg the heArt or troubliNg the miNd?
This is not so much an essay as a kind of rumination on two different ways in which place (especially the natural landscape) seems to have mattered to Australian poets once they had recovered from the initial shock of “otherness” or “awayness” and entered the phase of claiming possession. It is therefore probably recklessly speculative (a privilege of retirement that I hope Bruce Bennett will also enjoy) and also remarkably free of scholarly references, thanks to the fact that I had to “seek a theme” while myself away in exotic places like Tonga and Argentina, where library resources on Australian literature are not to hand. These two ways might be summed up as “Emblem of National Identity” versus “Country that Built My Heart.” The latter phrase is of course from Judith Wright’s “Train Journey” and that poem forms, for my discussion, an exemplary pair with Alec Hope’s “Australia.” In the following passages, the difference is not so much in physical perception, considerable as that may be, as in the attitudinal stance that colours and determines the evaluation of what is “seen:” Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon, out of the confused hammering dark of the train I looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart; and the small trees on their uncoloured slope like poetry moved, articulate and sharp and purposeful under the great dry flight of air; … I woke and saw the small dark trees that burn suddenly into flowers more lovely than the white moon. Wright: “Train Journey,” from The Gateway (195�)
Westerly v54:1 1 A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey In the field uniform of modern wars, Darkens her hills, those endless outstretched paws Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away. They call her a young country, but they lie: She is the last of lands, the emptiest, A woman beyond her change of life, a breast Still tender but within the womb is dry… Yet there are some like me turn gladly home From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find The Arabian desert of the human mind, Hoping, if still from the desert prophets come, Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there. A. D. Hope: “Australia,” from The Wandering Islands (1955) The assumption that the poet’s task included defining an identity for Australia as place/nation was something of a commonplace until the 1950s, and continues into the present, if less insistently and at times in a revisionist mode that actively resists earlier identifications. A glance at the “Index of Titles” in the Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (a national identity anthology prepared for an international audience in
- shows a substantial number of poems called “Australia,” including one of the five published under that title by Mary Gilmore, between 1917 and 19 �2. Hope’s poem, quoted above, is very much an idea of the identity of Australia, with an abstractness also found in O’Dowd’s sonnet of the same title. But its oppositional structure – its reversal of the home and away terms to make Europe – “over there” – the place of “awayness” links it (although I’m not sure Hope would be pleased by the comparison) to the strategy of Dorothea Mackellar’s much�quoted “Australia” (first published in 190 � as “Core of my Heart”). Very few of us remember that her poem starts with a stanza that acknowledges cool green England as the conventional home of poetry before swinging defiantly into “ I love a sunburnt country” – people, however, infrequently read that line with the right emphasis.
Westerly v54:1 1 although it will only be able to do this if the poem has a power beyond that of mere reminiscence: so it is “Sing, memory, sing” that she commands at the beginning of “An Impromptu for Ann Jennings.” Whether light (and its absence) would have been so dominant in Harwood’s symbolic repertoire if she had not experienced the physical shock of losing Brisbane’s brilliance to the more subdued tones of Tasmania one really cannot say. What we can glimpse in the concluding line of “1945” (“With the world that was the case already fading”) is a context for the adaptability that enabled her to grow into having an equal if different attachment to Tasmania’s landscapes. “1945” reminds us that there are different geographical as well as historical fields. And in one sense, Harwood’s poetry seems almost impervious to Australia’s socio�political history. A shadow of what was done to Tasmania’s Aborigines brushes the surface of “Oyster Cove,” but it certainly doesn’t send her back to scrutinise (at least in her poetry) whether Queensland was similarly tainted. It is the history of ideas, of Wittgenstein and Ayres and Heidegger, that comes into play in Harwood’s writing. Gilmore and Wright are another story altogether. Apart from both being activists in social movements, both found that their sense of past rural Australia became inextricably affected by the history of the dispossession of the first people of the land, and by the knowledge of the ecological consequences of a settlement within which they were implicated by ties of ancestry. In one sense, Gilmore weathered the consequent storm better than Wright, if only because her passions were more diffused and her tolerance of inconsistency very much higher – to the very end she could praise the “pioneers” (and use the term without irony) with one breath, and decry their slaughter of Aborigines or their destruction of habitat with another. Once Wright had moved from the The Generations of Men (1959) to The Cry for the Dead (19�1) such havering was largely impossible: if a “marginal sort of grace” is conceded to the Wright clan in “For a Pastoral Family” ( Phantom Dwelling , 19 ��), it is no answer to the awakened sense of complicity that drives the questions of the final line of the sequence: “Keep out? Stay clean? Who can?” One could say that a sense of history gave Gilmore a voice, but – in the end – silenced Wright. When Wright pays tribute to Gilmore in “To Mary Gilmore” ( Alive , 197 �), it is not so much the overlapping of their Aboriginal and ecological interests that is central, as Wright’s admiration for Gilmore’s refusal to give up in the face of discouragement, her persistence in keeping “the ink running” rather than yielding to the temptation to “sit and grieve.”
Westerly v54: I find it incontrovertible that Gilmore’s return in 1921 to Goulburn and the Riverina area of her childhood, with its consequent re�contact with stories of the settlement era, gave her poetry (as well as the two much more profitable prose books of reminiscences in 19 � 4 and 19 �5) a focus and force she would never otherwise have achieved. The poems of The Wild Swan (19�0) are among her very best and since space is limited, I’ve privileged the ecological over the Aboriginal – although the two are often intertwined – in choosing to exemplify their power by quoting the concluding stanza of “The Wild Swans_._ ” The first three stanzas celebrate a remembered natural plenitude embodied in the migratory swans, only to conclude: Never again as of old shall we know the flight Of the swans in their going; like petals they fell, They are gone, they are dead; they have passed in the blight Of our being! Never again will the day, or the night, Hear, as they fly, the sound of their trumpeting bell On the air till it dies like the lapse of a swell! Never again shall the moonlight gleam on the wing! Like a blast of the desert we came, and we slew; We burned the reeds where the nestlings lingered, till Spring, That sang in the bird, came in like a dull dead thing! Now only the dreamer dreams of the hosts we knew, That trembling died in the flame of our passing through. As I just said, Gilmore’s passions were more diffuse than those of Wright and one thing that marks her out from both Wright and Harwood is that she really enjoyed urban living in her flat at King’s Cross (and a completely different essay could be written about the affirmation of the city as the place of Australia’s history – think of Furnley Maurice’s “The Towers of Melbourne,” Chris Wallace�Crabbe’s suburbia, Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (no wonder Miles Franklin hated it!). I’d like to draw attention to Gilmore’s late poem “The Flower Stall” ( Fourteen Men , 1954). This expresses her delighted reaction to the sight of a Kings Cross flower� stall where bees are swarming around the brilliantly�coloured flowers that they have followed “from Wahroonga down.” I cite it not because it’s her best city poem, but because it illustrates not only her at homeness in the city but also, in the concluding stanza, something of Gilmore’s apparently incurable optimism about life, a quality that attracted her to the vitalism that informs much of her poetry in the 1920s:
4 Westerly v54: Curiously, “Australia 1970” seems to me to be related to Hope’s “Australia” in the generality and the emblematic nature of the imagery, and in the value it places on wilderness/desert against city. But it speaks out of a different historical context as well as a different personal history. Provided properly and used properly, knowledge of something about both place and time will not smother the poem, but help us understand it. There is one other aspect in the work of these three poets that interests me, and that’s the way they exemplify the twentieth century’s interest in language and changing attitudes to the relationship between word and world. Gilmore retains a kind of evolutionary confidence in language as the supremely human achievement, worried perhaps about her own capacity to make it work, but untroubled by postmodern doubts about its representational reliability, its slippery, even disconnected, relationship with the world of objects. Harwood, who established herself for much of her career as a mistress of playful, sometimes strenuous, language games, and who sometimes wrote as if music was the only divine language, surprised her readers in the late Pastorals with a kind of dismissal of human speech in favour of “the pure, authentic speech/ that earth alone can teach.” “Threshold,” from which these lines come, is, however, a complex poem: is it simply accepting an irreconcilable difference between that “pure authentic speech” and human “words and thoughts” that are “ground like pebbles in the stream of time” or is it in fact trying to demonstrate that the former is the speech that Harwood has now learned/ is learning? In either case it seems a light�filled, somehow hopeful, poem compared to Wright’s “Summer.” For much of her career Wright held valiantly to an ideal of the expressive powers of language to unify poet and place. If the shadow of history intervened in poems like “At Cooloolah,” it was not a failure of language that was the issue. But in the late (and final) poems of Phantom Dwelling she abandons the possibility, registering language as the cause of an unbridgeable distance between the human and the natural world. In a landscape wounded psychically by the shed blood of its first people and physically by the past activities of miners, she reflects that she will “never know” the natural “inhabitants” she briefly evokes before concluding: In a burned�out summer, I try to see without words as they do. But I live under a web of language. As do we all, writers and their historians together.
